Excerpt From
Surviving a Stalker:

Imagine being pursued . . . hunted . . . by someone who knows your every move. He calls so often that every time you answer a phone, no matter where you are, you think it’s him. Most of the time you’re right. You walk out your door, your place of work, your health club, your favorite restaurant, and he’s there. You look in your rear-view mirror, and he’s there too.

You begin to think you’re paranoid, but you take extra precautions anyway. No matter what you do, you can’t seem to shake the guy. Then you go away for a holiday. His incessant barrage of letters—some threatening, others declarations of love—finds you although you left no forwarding address. “Hey, somebody is watching you,” reads one note. “Somebody is watching you in or out of the office, in or out of bed, in or out of the bathroom. The road ahead for you is a real bitch. It’s going to get more and more and more ugly!”

You’ve no place to run. No place to hide. Literally. Panic sets in. You fear you’re going to die. There’s nothing you can do.

Welcome to Elaine Applegate’s* life. She’d been involved with Dan Thornton* for just a few weeks. Initially, the handsome, six-foot-five-inch dentist presented himself as kind, gentle and sensitive, precisely the Alan Alda type she’d been looking for. Once they became involved, however, he seemed to metamorphose overnight. First, the alcohol problem he’d concealed from her surfaced. Then came his irrational jealousy and possessiveness. When he started trying to restrict what she did and whom she saw, Elaine, an accomplished CPA with an unwaveringly high sense of self-esteem, broke off their involvement. Her decision, however, was not one he would accept.

He phoned her day and night. He followed her wherever she went. He vandalized her property. He threatened to hurt those friends she spent time with. He threatened to hurt her.

Afraid of what he might do, Elaine began to fear for her life. She lost her appetite and her ability to sleep, both symptoms of clinical depression. She lost her ability to concentrate. Her performance at work declined. She began to see a therapist, and to take anti-depressant medication.

“You’ve got a real problem on your hands,” the local police told her. “But there’s nothing we can do. We’re helpless.” They encouraged her to keep a log of his calls and to hand over the taped messages he’d left on her answering machine. In addition they advised her to obtain a restraining order from the courts that would legally restrict him from contacting her in person, on the phone or through the mail.

“You’re just trying to set up this paper trail so that if he kills me, you can arrest him,” Elaine charged.

“That’s right,” they responded.

America has been hit with an escalating crisis it doesn’t know how to handle. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people have fallen victim to individuals who have obsessively focused on them. Until recently, the news spotlighted only celebrity cases. The shooting of John Lennon in 1980 set the tone for an era of unparalleled violence towards celebrities. In 1981, John Hinckley, Jr. sought to impress Jodie Foster by attempting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. The following year, actress Theresa Saldana was repeatedly stabbed by a Scottish drifter named Arthur Richard Jackson, who perceived himself as “the benevolent angel of death.” And in 1989, an obsessed fan shot to death twenty-one-year-old Rebecca Schaeffer, costar of the television series My Sister Sam.

In the last twenty-five years, such incidents have snowballed. Today an estimated one hundred and fifty thousand people in the United States are pursuing some kind of unwarranted and inappropriate contact with media figures.

But unwanted pursuit is not reserved for the rich and famous. While the prominent cases may attract more media attention, the majority of stalking victims are not public figures, but people like you and me. Victims’ rights organizations figure that about seven hundred thousand cases are reported annually. Add to that the equal number of cases that never come to the attention of the police, and you’re looking at close to a million five hundred thousand cases a year.

That's a million and a half individuals whose lives have been torn apart. "Stalking is an act of terror that builds a prison of fear around its victims," says Attorney General Janet Reno.

A 1997 National Institute of Justice study estimates that 8 percent of the nation’s women (and 2 percent of the nation’s men) are or will become stalking victims. But talk to any number of women, especially those in their twenties and thirties, and even that estimate will sound low. Universities surveyed about unwanted pursuit all had stories to tell. One university attorney spoke of a college-aged admirer whose letters to a fellow classmate went from doting to threatening. Eventually the disturbed student sprayed animal blood on the door of the young woman with whom he was infatuated. “But no harm was done,” the attorney concluded. Gavin de Becker, widely regarded as the country’s foremost authority on stalking and the author of The Gift of Fear, disagrees. “He meant that there had been no attack,” says de Becker, whose work in the assessment and management of more than eleven thousand stalking cases has earned him a position on a congressional committee, three presidential appointments, and an award from the FBI. “There was tremendous harm in terms of fear, anxiety and disruption of day-to-day life.”

No physical injury was suffered in that incident. In fact, millions of pursuit cases do not end in violence. In general, however, stalkers are becoming increasingly brutal.

Detroit, Michigan, August 30, 1985 Shortly after Sandra Henes files for divorce, her estranged husband kidnaps her from a parking lot, rapes her repeatedly and threatens her with a .357 magnum in a desperately ill-conceived attempt to save their marriage. “You’ll never get rid of me,” he raves. “I’ll always be in your life. The only way I’ll leave you alone is if I’m dead.” The assault ends when the Detroit SWAT team breaks down the door eighteen hours later.

Chicago, Illinois, August 5, 1989 After violating a protective order three separate times, Sheila Gallo’s former husband kills her. Their divorce had been final for just two days.

Richmond, Virginia, February 9, 1989 Regina Butkowski is kidnapped and later shot in the temple by a weight lifter who had become obsessed with her after she befriended him at a health club.

Monroe Beach, Michigan, October 3, 1990 Deborah Frost’s old high-school boyfriend kills her while out on bond. The young man, who came from “a nice family” according to the victim’s mother, had never gotten over her. Eleven encounters with the law over a ten-month period did nothing to change his intentions or the outcome.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 9, 1992 Shirley Lowery waits in the hall outside a courtroom where she’s applied for a restraining order against the man with whom she’d once lived. Before she ever makes it inside, Benjamin Franklin stabs her nineteen times, fulfilling his promise to make Shirley pay for leaving him.

Boston, Massachusetts, May 30, 1992 Eleven days after Kristin Lardner gets a permanent injunction to keep Michael Cartier away from her, the twenty-two-year-old bouncer walks up to her in the middle of a busy street during daylight hours and shoots her repeatedly in the head. He was on probation at the time, for the beating of a previous girlfriend. “If the courts had checked his record or spoken to police when she sought help, he would have been locked up rather than set loose to kill her,” Kristin’s sister Helen Lardner, a Washington lawyer, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

Statistics on stalking are limited, principally because the cases wind up being classified as the crime into which they usually escalate, such as assault or homicide. But most authorities agree that the overwhelming number of stalking victims are women. In fact, 90 percent of the fifteen hundred women killed by their current or former mates each year in this country were stalked before being murdered. That doesn’t mean that most stalking victims are killed. But “there’s a far greater chance that an ordinary citizen case is going to result in a tragic conclusion than the celebrity,” says Lieutenant John Lane, former head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Threat Management Unit, created especially to deal with stalking cases.

Stalkers don’t just prey on their individual targets. In cases involving family units, children frequently wind up as the victims. In October 1992, for example, Andrew Taylor* made good on a prior threat. After his attempts at reconciliation—and his intimidation campaign—failed, he kidnapped his one-month-old daughter from her mother, a respiratory therapist. Authorities found the bodies of the unemployed actor and the baby, whom he’d strangled, by a nearby beach. Eight months later, a South Dakota man shot his estranged wife and their two children just before their divorce was to become final.

Obsessed pursuers will frequently harass a third party to whom the actual target is attached in order to gain the intense impact and reaction they seek. “The easiest way to get to me is to get to the people I love,” said Sarah Jane Williams*, whose grandmother wound up in a nursing home after being knocked over when a prowler—presumably Sarah Jane’s stalker—broke into her home.

How did he know where to find the ninety-eight-year-old woman? Or for that matter Sarah Jane, whom he continues to harass by phone even though she changes her number so often it takes her a few seconds to remember her current one?

Today’s easy access to information has made us all potential victims. In his book Privacy For Sale, Jeffrey Rothfeder explains how the proliferation of computerized records containing information about personal, private lives (five billion records to date in the United States alone) means that a person with the right skills or contacts can find out virtually everything about us, from our whereabouts to our finances to our purchasing habits and family ties.

Why would one person obsess about another to the point of craving this sort of intimate information?

Anyone who has ever fallen in love or been infatuated knows how close the experience can be to a spiritual or drug-induced high. Suddenly, your thoughts are consumed with one single being. Everything you see or do seems to bring him or her to mind. You find yourself doing things you wouldn’t under any other circumstances. Like calling repeatedly only to hang up, or using a fake voice just to see if anyone is home. Or driving by the house or apartment again and again just for a glimpse.

The truth is that, for most of us, we’re in love not just with the person, but with our projection of what kind of couple we’ll make, the needs that he or she will fulfill, and the idealized notion of love in general. Before we’ve even gotten to know whom we’re really dealing with, we’ve fallen in love with what that person could represent to our future.

The individual whose life is a void waiting to be filled, however, takes those feelings and amplifies them. The person with whom he’s infatuated becomes his reason to exist. Any contact is better than no contact, any information a way to feel more intimately involved—even if no relationship exists. That emptiness also helps explain the explosion that takes place during the separation or divorces of many couples, when those who have used their relationships to define their identity simply can’t afford to let go.